


Hand In Hand

by melannen



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prehistoric, Cave Paintings, Caves, Empty Chairs, France (Country), Gen, Memories, Painting, Post Barricade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 08:38:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the south of France, a group of young men once came together to teach, to learn, and to fight for the rights of all humankind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hand In Hand

Thanks-Across-the-Water faltered for a moment as he scrambled over the largest of the boulders that blocked the narrow passageway, the new-healed wound in his side hurting as the motion of the climb stretched it. 

Lark-Who-Laughs, following behind him on her small bare feet, reached toward him with the hand not holding their light. "Are you hurt?" she asked with concern.

"I'm fine," he told her, when he had caught his breath again and the burn in his flank had faded. "We're almost here. Hand me the torch while you climb." He had traveled this path countless times; even in the the solid dark that would cover them without the light of their single flame, he thought he would still walk it, sure-footed; but he had not been here in many weeks, not since he was injured on that terrible day, and Lark did not know the way.

She scrambled up as nimbly as ever though, and he gave her back the torch to scramble along the other side of the ancient rockfall, and then helped her down. Two steps later, the passage suddenly spread into a wide chamber, and Lark gasped as the space opened around them in the torch's light.

Water did not know what she saw when she looked around her. For him, it was too overlaid with memory, with vision that went beyond sight, for him to ever again see it simply as it was.

The walls of the chamber were covered with bright paintings, white and red and black and yellow, images of cattle, of deer and lions and rhinoceros and horses running and leaping across the stone, the dark shapes of the People scattered among them in dances and hunts. In the wavering shadows of the single torch, they seemed to move again, as if the painters had captured them alive and trapped them on the stone.

Water had been there as they were painted, on many of the secret nights when his friends had crept to these forbidden chambers in their silence and dark. In his mind's eye, he saw them again, as if they had never ceased painting: Leaves-in-Spring working with careful concentration, creature after creature appearing as detailed as life beneath his hands; and beside him, Great-Sky of the double spirit laughing and chatting as zie worked, zie's images looser and less detailed than Leaf's but imbued with the same semblance of life.

Behind them a small fire would be burning in the lowest part of the floor, sending up clouds of perfumed smoke as Valley-of-Strength and Merry-Wings, their students of medicine, carefully tended it and fed it with secret herbs. Even now Water could see how Leaf's horses had grown sloppier and more full of life as the smoke of that fire drifted into his mind, though Great-Sky's remained the same: zie's mind was always half-dwelling with those powers, and the scent of the herbs could do no more to zie.

Around the fire Shout-Out-Loud and Heart-of-Spirit and Eagle's-Voice would be singing, the old half-forgotten chants that were now forbidden, the pure tones of Sings-to-Gods' flute ringing around the cavern in sweet counterpoint and transformed by its echoes into something far greater and wilder, and beside them Beauty-That-Burns, the light of the fire catching in his bright hair and turning it into the sun in a cavern, the fire of his passion shining in his eyes.

"It's beautiful," Lark said, her soft voice breaking through the memory of song, as she gazed around her with wide eyes, holding the torch high.

"They found this place accidentally," he told her, "but they kept coming back."

"Accidentally?" asked Lark with a smile. "Did Eagle fall in?" Lark hadn't known his friends very well, but even she knew about Eagle's luck.

"He did," Water said, letting himself laugh at the memory the way Eagle always had. "He and Merry-Wings were looking for a little privacy and he turned the wrong way and slid halfway down that first steep passageway before he could even cry out. Merry-Wings hauled him back up, and then they brought the others. There were paintings here already," he told her, pointing to the farthest corner, where an overhanging fold of the ceiling half-obscured the oldest images. "That's how they knew it was theirs."

By then, the old ways had already been banned by the new priest of the Goddess of the Waxing Moon, who had declared that the knowledge and practice of the great powers that flowed in the world could only be permitted to his chosen few, who would keep the world safe for the rest so long as they were properly placated.

Water's friends had denied that utterly: they believed that those powers belonged to everyone, the powers that flowed in the vast herds of hoofed beasts, in the loins of the great cats, in the flow of the rivers and the height of the mountains and the turning of the stars, and in the blood of every man and woman and double-spirit of the People: it was everyone's, one great family standing together, none raised above another. They had believed that, and they had come down to this great cavern to listen to their ancestors and to keep the People's faith in defiance of the priest and his Goddess, and they had died for it. They had bled out on the priest's command as he stood safely apart and declared that his Goddess would be pleased by their deaths; and now they would never come back to this chamber.

"Are these their hands?" Lark asked, and he turned to see where she pointed. Eight handprints, outlined in sprays of dark pigment like blood. He lifted his own hand to lay over them, but did not touch. There were Sings-to-Gods' strong, callused musician's hands, and Shout-Out-Loud's crooked fingers that had been broken and healed and broken again, Leaf's neat and carefully-crafted, but with a smear of yellow paint across the palm where he had not wiped his hand before pressing it to the stone; Merry-Wings and Eagle still side by side, Valley and Heart in the center of things as always, and Great-Sky's handprint half-overlapped on Beauty-That-Burns's, still half his shadow as zie had been in life.

There was a sudden soft clatter as Lark stumbled on something on the cave floor. Water picked it up: it was a shallow dish of broken bear skull, still half-full of the dry red earth they had used for color; left behind on that last joyful night of hope and song, to await the return of artists who would never come back for it.

"Here," said Water on impulse, and lifted Lark's slender hand against a small patch of bare wall near his friends' hands. "Hold that still. I think I remember how to do this."

"Water!" she said. "Should you? I was never part of this; I have no right--"

"Everyone was part of this," Water told her. "Anyway, that's what they would have said: that the ways of the painting belong to all the People, and so do the walls of the Earth." He scooped up some pigment with two fingers and laid it on his tongue, then closed his mouth to let his spit moisten it for a moment, and bent over Lark's hand. He pursed his mouth and blew out in the quick, hard bursts that Leaf had taught him, holding the pigment just behind his lips so that it sprayed out onto the wall in a soft-edged aureole around the shape of Lark's hand. When he was out of color, she moved her hand away, and there was the shape of it, to hold her memory long after she was dust. It wasn't as neatly-done or as dark as his friends', but it was clear enough. 

Water gave himself another mouthful of paint and put his hand up beside hers, leaving a mark of his own, the two of them side by side forever. It somehow felt like more of a joining than the ceremony that the priest had presided over between them, weeks ago, for all that it would likely never be seen by anyone but the two of them and the ghosts of his friends.

Among the paintings of the animals and people, the old ones and the new, the handprints and the shadows, there were rough scratches of lines and shapes: Leaf-in-Spring had noticed them among the ancient drawings of ibex and hyena, sealed over with a thin layer of flowing rock, and Valley-of-Strength and Merry-Wings had recognized them as kin to the signs they had been learning in antler carvings and amulet-bags, that let them make pictures of things that could not be captured in paint as obviously as a wild horse or a lion. Water had not paid much attention when Leaf and Valley taught the others how to make them; he'd been too occupied with his courtship of Lark, and besides, their totems and songs were not his fathers'.

But he remembered some of it. He remembered enough. He spat into the dish to moisten the rest of the red earth, and then between his and Lark's hands, and his friends', he wrote the wavy sign for "song", and the round one for "life," and then the crooked line that meant "a generation of the People." That one he drew again, and again, and again, until he had no more paint left.

 _A thousand generations of humankind_ , he told his friends, past the barriers of time, _For a thousand generations, your song will live on._

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly late entry for the Les Mis Across History challenge but then I can never do that sort of thing right.
> 
> Some random history notes:
> 
> 1\. This cave is not Lascaux or Pech-Merle or any of the other painted caves currently scattered through the home-ground of Les Amis, but perhaps one day someone with Bossuet's luck will stumble into it again.
> 
> 2\. There is a hypothesis that the less figural signs found in some of the caves might be a very primitive writing system - it's a somewhat fringe hypothesis at the moment, but I figured if anyone was writing then, it would be the Friends of the ABCs. (The method Marius used for making the handprints is quite well attested, though.)
> 
> 3\. In my head, the Priest and his Goddess of the Waxing Moon are the Thenardiers, who are running a combination fertility cult/con game that mostly involves selling cheap pornographic figurines of Mme. Thenardier.
> 
> 4\. There is no really compelling evidence that there was a place for genderqueer people in this culture and time, but there's some suggestive bits of possibility that there might have been, and frankly looking cross-culturally it's more likely they did than that they didn't, so I said screw it and went with it.
> 
> 5\. Beer has not been invented yet, much less wine or liquor. This is possibly the biggest canon divergence I had to deal with. :P
> 
> 6\. ...but appearances aside, I didn't do much actual research for this story, I was mostly working from vague memories of research I've done for other stories over the years, so it's very likely I got stuff wrong.


End file.
